Luke Baincross

Luke Baincross was an aging playboy. Age 51 and recently out of his third marriage, Baincross had inherited Baincross Manor from his family, who had made their fortune in trading with India in the days of the British Empire, leaving them with a wide collection of Indian art that Baincross was forbidden to sell due to elaborate clauses in the family will.

Needing a well-paying con after their last mark had a heart attack and his brother, 'Czech Charlie', demanded the £500 000 return on his brother's alleged investment, the team targetted Baincroft, claiming that they would help him pull off an elaborate insurance scam involving the most valuable item in his collection; a life-sized jewel-encrusted tiger. Unable to simply steal the tiger from the mansion as Baincross was on an insurance watch list which meant that it would take years of investigations before any insurance claim on something going missing from his estate would receive financial compensation, the team convinced Baincross to loan the tiger to the British Museum in perpetuity, thus avoiding the 'no-sale' clause while allowing the museum to be 'responsible' for the theft.

Having arranged for the tiger to be apparently stolen from the museum vault- in reality the team switched it with a covered ice sculpture before it was taken to the museum that simply melted overnight while it was in the increasingly hot vault-, the team received their reward for helping Baincross 'lose' the tiger. Having received their money, however, they then called the police as an anonymous tip to inform them that Baincroft had stolen the tiger himself as part of an insurance scam, leaving the tiger in his manor's swimming pool so that the museum could reclaim it for the planned exhibit.